Legacy (or How Long Can You Hold Your Arm Out In Front Of You)

When whales were sung along coastlines, as they are again

beaches bled spring water, from dunes to sea

When faraway whales fed a village for a year, distances were

measured in months, as they are again, moving through debris

My friend has cut herself, epaulettes of scars siren a time

where this was her only freedom

Tell the tongue and larynx that words are not actions. Tell

the lungs they are not the heart, tell the hand, the pen

Camouflage quails the nest in grass, a knot of wood shows

likeness to a bird, Frogmouthed to grey, to silver

Serial killers and CEOs measure themselves in thoughts

Imagining them(selves) into other minds they will never be

Freeze is the Bee-eater burrowed in the path of Tiger Snakes

Vivid simplicity of black hole in white sand

Soft loss of every near-death. Experience tells us, the tongue

the larynx should not move against this. Words.

Swift fission, he speaks and I becomes a murmuration of cells

and all that space. The dog’s head, the hand on it.

The scream, the slammed door, sounds that mark abrupt rupture

A snarl of bark shifting chronology

My friend doesn’t speak while needled with ink, the tattooist will

not know she has fainted. Her skin glows damp

This legacy/ then, a village unfed, well worn track through

scrub. A simple sentence; this greening of riparian trees

Revisit me, say the words, come again. Come close where they

can’t see you. Hold a hand long enough,  just,  long

Whale rises, ocean thick with song, to wave at a tour boat

Her slow eye following the fall of a mobile phone, through fathoms